Watch “The Americans”

It’s not a critic’s job to be a P.R. flack, to sell a show. We’re supposed to maintain healthy boundaries, gazing at art from an Olympian distance. But there are certain TV series that bring out the evangelist in any writer, and, in a world of hype for “prestige cable dramas”—the Internet’s favoritetopictoobsessabout—FX’s smart thriller “The Americans” came in way too far under the radar last year.

The pitch is simple: married Soviet spies in the eighties. Keri Russell and the outstanding Matthew Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, a middle-aged couple living in the suburbs with two teen-age kids. Their marriage is, in one sense, a cover story. At nineteen and twenty, they were paired up by their Communist handlers, and for years they’ve been pretending to work at a travel agency while secretly acting as colleagues in espionage. In another sense, the two have an unusually intimate marriage, although, as with many long-married couples, they’ve changed over the years—at times, seeing one another as strangers. Elizabeth is a true believer in the Soviet cause; Philip is a pragmatist. Philip’s feelings for Elizabeth have always been more powerful than hers for him, in part because of Elizabeth’s icy, angry streak, which has its origins in an early rape, a trauma she buried for years. There are mutual infidelities and, near the end of last season, the couple separated, then reunited. As if that weren’t enough agita for one relationship, Philip now has a second marriage: a fake one with a clueless F.B.I. secretary, as Elizabeth pretends to be his nerdy sister.

If this sounds too blah-blah psychological for you, don’t worry: there’s sex and violence to spare. Part of Elizabeth and Philip’s job is to seduce sources: the couple are as skilled at seduction as they are at espionage. There’s sharp dialogue. And the wigs! Oh, my God, the wigs—so many, so varied, so eighties. “The Americans” can be wrenchingly emotional, and it’s terrifically well paced. But it doesn’t take itself overly seriously, and while the show looks pretty good it’s not the most cinematic series on the block. I’ve watched the first five episodes of Season 2, and, while I don’t want to spoil the new installments, I will say that they made my heart speed up, that there’s a subplot about Russian Jews, and that Annet Mahendru—she plays Nina, an F.B.I. double agent who works at the Russian Embassy—may be the most beautiful woman on earth. One of the show’s best subplots involves her manipulative relationship with the Jenningses’ neighbor, an F.B.I. agent played by the excellent Noah Emmerich, and her response to the machinations of a new character, a rich-kid agent, who begins to nose into her life. It’s exceptionally difficult to take sides with this show: the villains are victims, the victims are villains, and the show’s most sympathetic character—Philip, so tender with his children, so intelligent and complex—is a cold Soviet assassin.